Yves Tanguy

Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage were two of Surrealism's leading painters, who together elaborated de Chirico's world of isolate and obdurate forms into eerie landscapes sparsely populated with biomorphic life forms. Here, for the first time, the work of this dynamic couple is explored in depth. An essay by Stephen Robeson Miller examines the intersection of Sage's and Tanguy's biographies with their work, accurately recounting for the first time Sage's conversion to Surrealism. A second essay by Jonathan Stuhlman traces the ways in which Sage's art influenced Tanguy's. These essays are accompanied by color plates containing several previously unreproduced works and photographs.

In 1942, at the opening of her Art of This Century gallery, Peggy Guggenheim famously demonstrated her equability toward both Surrealist and abstract art by wearing one earring made by Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy and one by abstract sculptor and kinetic artist Alexander Calder. Yet the opposition implied by this act of truce-making perhaps overstates the antimonies between these two modernist masters. Tanguy and Calder shared many friends in Surrealist circles in Paris, and showed work in the same exhibitions throughout the middle of the century. In this beautiful volume, full of color reproductions and important ephemera relating to the artists' shared history, Susan Davidson, Senior Curator of collections and exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, elucidates the overlap between these two canonical modernists.